[00:00:07] Speaker A: Today on ID the future, we're happy to bring you another interview with Doctor Tom Woodward, host of the Universe Next Door, syndicated radio broadcast in conjunction with Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. Doctor Woodward regularly interviews CSC scientists and scholars on various aspects of the debate over darwinian evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Welcome to the universe next door. Our program today is really exciting because we have back with us on our program Doctor Jonathan Wells. He is an expert in cell biology. He is an expert in other fields such as the history of the creation evolution debate as it evolved, that's my pun intended, in the 18 hundreds, especially as it was involving some of the great universities or colleges, I guess they were called back then, of the United States, Yale, Princeton and so forth. And we of course are going to dive into some of these icons that he wrote about in his book, icons of Evolution, subtitled Science or Myth. Doctor Jonathan Wells is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He is a leading researcher in so many areas such as the junk DNA area. He's written a very important book called the myth of junk DNA, which you can get through Discovery Institute. I recommend it highly. It's a slender but powerful volume. He has written a book which I use as a textbook in many of my courses. It's called the politically incorrect guide. Isn't that a great name? Bill the pig. P I g. They actually have a little of a pig symbol throughout the book. But the politically incorrect guide to darwinism and intelligent design, and it is tied with another book called Darwin strikes back as a great book, as a great overview of this whole area. I think that they should be read in tandem. And so Doctor Jonathan Wells has graciously agreed to come back and join us on the program. Thank you so much for your excellent research in these areas and bringing them down to a level where we can understand them. Doctor Wells, thanks so much.
[00:02:21] Speaker C: You're very welcome.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Well, your work of course, in the last ten, or actually, I guess 15 years or more through the Discovery Institute goes almost without introduction. You have been called, I think, on one occasion, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. That's a designation which I don't know who came up with that, but it's more humorous than Siri recalled.
[00:02:46] Speaker C: A lot worse than that.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: Okay, well, I think that you have at least that has gravitas. That has gravitas.
So we have many people who have tried to poo poo intelligent design, including Richard Dawkins. He has said in his book, the God Delusion, especially in the chapter number four, why there almost certainly is no God. I think that's funny. He qualified it, but he has said in that chapter that natural selection can handle all the questions that you may throw at evolution. Natural selection, of course, is the one answer that makes total sense. And the explanation offered by intelligent design theorists such as Michael Behe in irreducible complexity being a marker of designed entities, you know, the little machines such as the flagellum or the cilia, those little tails that whip back and forth on the surface of our windpipe and other such amazing structures. Ribosome that processes rna and reads it three letters at a time and turns that pattern of information into a beautiful little protein molecule that can curl up and form its three dimensional shape. That ribosome machine, we would say, is irreducibly complex. And he would say, oh, no, everything can be handled, thank you very much, by natural selection. So the arguments, the evidence offered by design is, according to the great defender of darwinism, the great advocate of clear headed atheism, Richard Dawkins, is all answered by natural selection. And, of course, Doctor Jonathan Wells with us today, author of Icons of evolution. You've critiqued in your book the power of Natural Selection as a be all, an end all, as a mechanism that can explain the creation of new life forms. And you've said that we don't really see a powerful evidence for natural selection doing much of anything in, for example, the peppered moths or Darwin's finches or even the four winged fruit flies. So explain to us why natural selection does not impress you or any of the other scientists who have done extensive work and have earned PhDs in biology.
[00:05:18] Speaker C: Well, as my old friend Philip Johnson once said, natural selection really amounts to non random death.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:05:28] Speaker C: All it means is that some organisms, they die. They die because they're not up to surviving in the environment in which they find themselves.
So you mentioned Darwin's finches, which is. It's funny, they, you know, Darwin hardly studied them at all. They were named Darwin's finches a century later by somebody else. But these are finches on the Galapagos islands in the Pacific. And some biologists in the 1970s, this was now almost 150 years after Darwin visited the galapagos. In the 1970s, some biologists went to these islands and studied the finches and one species in particular. And the biologists were very lucky the birds weren't. But because a drought occurred, and during the drought, the food pretty much disappeared.
And so 85% of the finch species on this island died.
And the ones that survived were the lucky ones that had slightly larger beaks that they needed to crack the remaining seeds, which were very few.
So the average beak size of that population increased about 5%.
Now, none of the beaks changed. Some of these birds had bigger beaks to begin with, and they were lucky enough to survive, but natural selection didn't produce those big beaks.
The next generation of birds, during the drought, also had, on average, slightly larger beaks, because they were born from birds with larger beaks. But then, when the rains came back a few years later, there was plenty of food, and the average beak size went back to the way it was before. There was no permanent change, no new species.
And as I said a minute ago, natural selection didn't produce larger beaks. All it did was kill off those who had smaller beaks. And that is the sum total of what natural selection can do. It has never been observed to produce anything more than that. And the idea that it is capable, producing complex organs and new species is absolutely without evidence.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Well, you know, it's interesting, you know, Peter and Rosemary Grant, I think you're referring to them because I'm holding the Darwin's finches chapter in your wonderful book, icons of evolution. And they're professors. The husband and wife team are professors at Princeton University and have made them, I guess, at least their biology department, a little bit more famous than it could have been without them. And in the alumni weekly copy I just got, since I was fortunate to attend the class of 72, they were featured as. And I think they're just entering retirement now, or just, you know, maybe retired a year or two ago. Their work in the Galapagos with those Darwin's finches was hailed, has some great achievement. And I looked at the COVID a picture of them on the COVID and thought, oh, my goodness, much to do about nothing, because, as you said, it's oscillation, it's back and forth movement. And isn't it true that a lot of this micro evolution doesn't even involve mutations, it's just expression of genetic potential that's there?
[00:08:46] Speaker C: In the case of the finches, yes. We actually know very little about the genetics of beaks, and this was not due to mutations of any kind. It was just a sorting of the information that was already there. I should add that I think Peter and Rosemary Grant did some excellent work.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:09:04] Speaker C: They really. They worked hard, they camped out on this barren rock, they made lots of observations, and the work they did was fine. It's just that the result of the work is in terms of macro evolution, you know, the whole picture, it's trivial.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: So they did excellent work in tracking in terms of field work and writing it up. Tracking microevolution, is that fair to say?
[00:09:29] Speaker C: Okay, yes, it was micro evolution, but you cannot involve the origin of a new species, a new organ, a new beak or anything like that.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: Okay, so you cannot extend microevolution. Dot, dot, dot, extrapolate it out to form a macro evolutionary event. Correct?
[00:09:46] Speaker C: Well, you can't in evidence. It's done all the time in theory, but it's purely a speculative extrapolation.
[00:09:53] Speaker B: Gotcha. Well, I know that in your chapter, four, winged fruit flies, some people have said that, well, if we get a mutation that takes two winged fruit flies and adds a second pair, that's wonderful. But you point out that that second pair of wings are not very functional and we only have like 35 seconds in this segment. So would you mind telling us a little bit more about that in the next segment?
[00:10:19] Speaker C: Be happy to.
[00:10:20] Speaker B: Okay. And if you would also, I want to talk about this discovery or the big brouhaha that has hit the press recently about human babies born with our, what are alleged to be tails and supposedly proving human ancestry. Today we are discussing a lot of evidences that are cracked up to be evidences either for or against the theory of evolution. Doctor Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution and many other powerful studies will be right back with us on the universe next door. We'll be right back.
Welcome back to the universe next door, where today we are doing a fantastic tour of the evidence, not only of the icons of evolution. A little bit of an update there with Doctor Jonathan Wells. The authorization of this fantastic required reading book on the supposed proofs of macroevolution, or you might call it darwinian evolution as taught in public textbooks, the public school and university textbooks, which are not all they're cracked up to be the evidence for evolution. And these proofs, these visual, often they're pictures or diagrams, are carefully analyzed by Doctor Jonathan Wells in his book Icons of Evolution. I recommend it very, very strongly for anybody interested in this area. If you haven't read icons of evolution, it is a must read book. It's mandatory reading for anybody who wants to be updated in this area. It is really a fantastic tour of what's wrong with the way that evolution is taught, and especially the textbook proofs. The ten icons are one by one critiqued. And I get a bit of a, kind of an overview, or provide a bit of an overview of the area in one chapter in my own book, Darwin strikes back, which came out in the year 2006, which I believe was about the same year that Doctor Jonathan Wells book, the politically incorrect guide to Darwinism and intelligent design, was published. So today we have again Doctor Jonathan Wells, and he's going to tackle here few more of these icons, and especially the one that has been bubbling up to the surface, a new icon, the tails that have been found and having to be surgically removed from babies. And some people say that's another proof of evolution, and not so vast. But before we get to that, the four winged fruit flies, Doctor Wells, tell us what has been alleged about this as a proof. And what do you see it really showing?
[00:12:58] Speaker C: Well, a normal fruit fly has two wings, and then behind each wing it has some little organelles or little features called balancers. And these little balancers vibrate at a very high frequency and help to stabilize the fly as it's flying. Well, it's possible to introduce a mutation into a fruit fly embryo that makes these balancers slightly larger. It's also possible to combine that mutation with two other artificially engineered mutations, so that the two balancers turn into normal looking wings. So the fruit fly now has four wings.
This doesn't happen naturally, it doesn't happen in nature. It has to be done by a skilled geneticist in the laboratory. So here we have a fruit fly with four wings. Well, what about it? Well, it turns out that the second pair of wings has no muscles attached to it, so the wings are useless. It would be kind of like having a small plane with an extra pair of wings dangling from the tail.
It does not help the plane fly. In fact, it might prevent it from even getting off the ground. And in fact, four wing fruit flies have great difficulty flying and mating, and they only survive if they're kept in a lab.
So the idea that some people have proposed in the past that these represent a way forward for evolution, that four winged flies evolved out of two winged flies by this mechanism, is totally absurd. They're monsters, they're cripples, they're evolutionary dead ends.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: Well, then that's a very important thing that you're saying here, a very, very important conclusion you're drawing, because it drives us back to the difficulty of mutations, crafting the necessary network of genetics. And even reminds me of what Steven Myers says about the developmental gene regulatory network. It is an actual like a circuit that is hardwired, or at least wired somehow into the genetic machinery of a cell. And so in your experience, have you seen random mutations producing genuinely new genetic information ever? Once random mutations?
[00:15:26] Speaker C: Well, random mutations can produce minor biochemical changes that in some situations might actually help a cell, like a bacterium, in the presence of an antibiotic. But I have never seen evidence of a genetic mutation producing any new anatomy that benefits the organism.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: Gotcha.
[00:15:48] Speaker C: Mutations can deform an organism, to be sure, but to produce a new organ or body plan, to my knowledge, that's never been observed.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: Well, I believe that in the recent flurry of discussion that has erupted, and I've been following it on evolutionnews.org here at the Discovery Institute news blog. I believe it's Carl Guyberson in his discussion. And what came out of it with Stephen Meyer, the bit of a debate that took place about a month ago, that there was the allegation that humans, the little babies born with an appendage, a little tail. He says that is an example, if you will, another icon of human babies having been, at least in this case, showing their ancestral heritage in apes or let's say, other animals, mammals that had tails. What would you make of that? Would you agree that we have here the attempt to create yet another icon of evolution, and do you think it is open to critique?
[00:16:53] Speaker C: Well, it may well be an attempt to create an icon of evolution, but the so called tales on human babies are, in my opinion, definitely not evidence of ancestry. Okay, first of all, they're very rare. Second of all, for my research, they're not tails. They're really just fleshy protuberances. They don't contain vertebrae like the spine, like a true tail, okay? In fact, they appear to be caused by the same kind of developmental defect that produces something called spina bifida, in which the baby's neural tube, the spinal cord, fails to develop fully. I've known many people with spina bifida. They're basically crippled from the waist down. In the case of these tails, which, and I say they're very rare, I think there may be something like 40 reported cases in the last century and a half out of the millions of babies born, they're developmental defects, they're not true tails. And I don't see why they provide any evidence for evolution at all. After all, the apes don't have tails.
Monkeys do. But that's quite a few stages back in the evolutionary history. So I just find the whole thing reaching for straws.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Right. Well, what I would say is, anybody interested in this brouhaha and this little hubbub? I would direct you to the discussion that has been
[email protected]. dot. It's a fantastic source for all your news on evolution and intelligent design. And Casey Luskin has written a brilliant series of articles. And Michael Egnor, e g n O R. Michael Egnor, head of neurosurgery at State University of New York at Stony Brook, has weighed in. He says no. In his role as a surgeon, he's removed these tails. They are not at all a tail, like you said, no vertebrae. They are not tails. So they are not a valid example of evolution. We are so indebted to you, Doctor Jonathan Wells, thanks for joining us on the universe next door. And thank you for listening to our program. We'll see you back here next week.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. Id. The future is Copyright Discovery Institute Institute 2014. For more information, visit www.intelligentdesign.org or www.idthefuture.com.
